Cuba on the Web; Indonesia’s Poaching Games; Mobile Addicts

Today’s Tech Sightings:

Cuba is finding its way to the Internet highway the rest of the world has been using, albeit very slowly. The challenge now is for the country to embrace the Internet as a vital tool for business and commerce and a host of other things. But to do that, President Raul Castro will have to find a way to expand Internet access without losing control of the information it imparts.

Indonesia has some of the world’s highest mobile penetration rates; and the country, home to diverse, imperiled species, has found a way to use that advantage to combat poaching. Mobile game developers and wildlife advocates have teamed up for a competition to produce games promoting wildlife conservation.

U.S. mobile phone owners spend 35 percent more time on their smartphones than they did in the second quarter of 2014. And they’re not alone. According to Simon Khalaf, senior vice president of publishing products at Yahoo, people who use their phones more than 60 times a day belong to a global category of up to 280 million “mobile addicts.” Regular mobile users access their phones about 16 times per day.

A study from market research firm GlobalWebIndex (GWI) found that three-quarters of about 50,000 Internet users access the WhatsApp messaging service from their Android devices. In contrast, 22 percent of users access WhatsApp on iPhone devices and 10 percent on Windows phones.

Facebook is taking on the competition’s virtual assistants – Apple’s Siri and Microsoft’s Cortana – with a new assistant dubbed M. The difference is that M is powered by humans, as well as technology. M trainers work with the software to respond to requests and offer more personal experiences than the competition.

Aida Akl is a journalist working on VOA's English Webdesk. She has written on a wide range of topics, although her more recent contributions have focused on technology. She has covered both domestic and international events since the mid-1980s as a VOA reporter and international broadcaster.